The 5 Best iPhone Camera Apps
March 29, 2011, By Christopher Ford 2 comments
Built into the iPhone is a great camera – for a cell phone. But even if you're judging it among all digital cameras, the iPhone's camera (especially the iPhone 4) is still pretty good. Even though the iPhone 4's camera is "only five megapixels" as some say, the important thing is the quality of those megapixels – not the number. And when it comes to quality, the iPhone 4's camera is really quite good.
Due to the size of the market, developers have made lots of great apps to work with the pictures you've been taking on your phone. There are a fair amount of bad apps, a lot of average and a few great apps available (and sometimes I think I've downloaded most of them). But they are changing all the time, and what might have been my go-to camera app a few months ago has now been relegated to my "Photography" folder. That’s exciting.
Here are the best of the camera and photography applications for having fun with pictures on your iPhone.
Camera+
Camera+ is probably the best comprehensive, end-to-end photography application I've found. It not only aims to replace the default "Camera" application that came with your iPhone, it also does a good job of letting you make some adjustments to those photos and then share them. In addition to the standard controls you expect in camera mode (zoom, snap a photo, flash control), Camera+ gives you the ability to take the picture on a timer "burst" shutter (holding down the shutter button takes photos rapidly for as long as you hold it down), and a stabilizer that will only take a picture when you hold the camera steady. Once that photo is taken, it puts the image in a "light box" where you can look at the pictures and delete or adjust them. The adjustment modes are also quite good, balancing the things experienced photographers might want with the simplicity that average iPhone users need. Like many other photo apps, you can then share the image via Email, Facebook, Twitter, or Flickr. You can also, of course, save it right back to your iPhone's "camera roll."
You can't use the iPhone camera app's "HDR" mode in Camera+, and the default setting has the images you take saved in the lightbox only, but you can change that setting to also save in the phone's "camera roll". The photos won't take as quickly with this setting on, but I think it's worth it to make sure you at least have a copy of the photo as it comes out of the camera. The buttons and the interface are all well thought out and where you'd want them to be, making the app very easy to use. I also like the Facebook integration, which allows you to determine which Facebook photo album you want to post it to or even allowing you to create a new album. I'm a big fan of Camera+, so much so that I've pretty much started using it as the default picture-taking application on my iPhone.
Camera+, $0.99 in the iTunes App Store.
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